This press release has a few misleading pieces that should be corrected for the public record:
"The spintronics field is barely a dozen years-old...The field of plasmonics, which is even younger than spintronics..."
This is patently untrue. Work on plasmon and surface plasmon physics has been going on for more than 50 years. It is certainly true that the name 'Plasmonics' is rather recent, and fabrication capabilities have advanced dramatically to better exploit these effects, but the field of study is fairly well established.
"One of the main challenges for plasmonics researchers is finding a way to propagate light over a long distance through solid materials."
Spintronics will not mitigate this problem. There are many plasmonic structures which have relatively long propagation lengths, but when one confines the field to lateral dimensions less than 1/100th of the wavelength, the propagation length is going to be very short, regardless of the electron spin.
To be legitimately called attosecond pulse, it must be shorter 100 attoseconds (10^-16 seconds). That would mean that one would need > 10^16 Hz of bandwidth just to obey basic fourier analysis, giving us a center free space wavelength of 30nm. It is pretty hard to call such an electromagnetic wave 'light', seeing as it is so deep into the hard UV, it's almost an x-ray ( 10^16 Hz of bandwidth.
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This press release has a few misleading pieces that should be corrected for the public record:
"The spintronics field is barely a dozen years-old...The field of plasmonics, which is even younger than spintronics..."
This is patently untrue. Work on plasmon and surface plasmon physics has been going on for more than 50 years. It is certainly true that the name 'Plasmonics' is rather recent, and fabrication capabilities have advanced dramatically to better exploit these effects, but the field of study is fairly well established.
"One of the main challenges for plasmonics researchers is finding a way to propagate light over a long distance through solid materials."
Spintronics will not mitigate this problem. There are many plasmonic structures which have relatively long propagation lengths, but when one confines the field to lateral dimensions less than 1/100th of the wavelength, the propagation length is going to be very short, regardless of the electron spin.
To be legitimately called attosecond pulse, it must be shorter 100 attoseconds (10^-16 seconds). That would mean that one would need > 10^16 Hz of bandwidth just to obey basic fourier analysis, giving us a center free space wavelength of 30nm. It is pretty hard to call such an electromagnetic wave 'light', seeing as it is so deep into the hard UV, it's almost an x-ray ( 10^16 Hz of bandwidth.